Half Marathon Taper: It’s Not Just Less Running

Ever wonder what it's like when two seasoned coaches break down how they'd guide an athlete through different goals and challenges?

Welcome to Tread Lightly, the podcast where we bring you easily digestible data-driven insights.

We're all about making training accessible, inclusive, and fun, whether you're new or aiming to level up.

I'm cohost Laura of Laura Norris Running. I have my masters of applied exercise science, and I've been coaching since 2015.

I've worked with hundreds of runners from first-racist podium finishes.

And I'm your cohost Amanda Brooks of Run to the Finish since 2012.

I've written thousands of running articles and worked with as many runners through both one-on-one and group programs.

So runners, start your watches and let's go.

Hello runners! Today we're going to talk about the ever-exciting taper, taper crazies.

What is taper? Why should you taper? Doesn't even matter if you taper, and eventually the word just sounds ridiculous.

But the reasons to do it are not, and we're excited to get into it.

As always, though, we will start off with a question.

This one comes from, at sometimes, I run Disney.

Are plyometrics something you'd encourage runners to incorporate into their warm-up?

Should they do 100 reps like you often see recommended on social media or something different?

This is a great question, because there's both a yes, but not quite like how we see it on social media.

If you want more of a deep dive into how plyometrics work, what they do for your running,

we have an episode back from March 2025 going deep into plyometrics.

They can be very beneficial in your warm-up in the appropriate dose.

So what they're doing is they're increasing like tendons, springiness, responsiveness.

Usually, though, in a warm-up, you don't want them to become too fatiguing.

So most runners will probably actually do best with somewhere between,

depending on your experience level, anywhere from like 15 to 45 foot strikes for plyometrics

in their warm-up 100 pounds. That's just a lot.

And I feel like it could begin to become its own little workout that way,

not necessarily that fatiguing, but 100 just seems excessive.

I agree with the idea that you want to make sure it doesn't become a workout before the actual

workout. I know one of the things we talked about was kind of an interesting study around doing

jump rope pre-running, and it was basically like a minute of jump roping just gave you like that

little spring. And I think some of it is the consistency of doing that pre-run over time,

like repeatedly, which is how any of our strength or any of these plyometrics really start to work.

So it's not, I do plyometrics before a run once a month, and it works. It is a consistency

factor. And so I think when you think of it that way as more of a, I pick a move or two,

and I do a few reps like before lots of runs, rather than like one day I go really hard on plyometrics,

probably bigger benefit overall. I agree with that. And your point to the jump rope made me think

also we should clarify what type of plyometric we're talking about. So movements like jump rope,

pogo hops, squat jumps maybe are much less stress on the body than say if you're doing depth jumps

or box jumps. So I would definitely recommend pogo hops. There's so many variations, single leg,

double leg side to side, front to back, etc. Or something like squat jumps. Don't go depth jumping

off a box 100 times before you're run. You're right. That's a really great

like important point like 20 box jumps in themselves way more fatiguing than a minute of kind of

practicing that light spring from a jump rope. So awesome. All right. Let's now start talking about

half marathons and tapering. One of the first things I do kind of want to address is

people skipping taper altogether. So I do think unfortunately it's common and there are a number

of reasons why one of them that I will often hear though is a fear of losing fitness because

you're reducing volume. And so mentally there is an assumption that you're losing fitness.

Hopefully we are going to dispel that for you as we go through what actually happens during a

correct taper. Yes, because a taper doesn't mean absolute training cessation. And even if you

stopped running for two weeks, you actually wouldn't lose a drastic amount of fitness. You might not

be sharpened and peaked for racing, but you aren't all of a sudden going to see these massive

drops in VO2 max or anything until like three or four weeks of doing absolutely nothing. But again,

we're not even doing absolutely nothing in the taper. We are doing a progressive, gradual,

deliberate reduction in training volume and time and intensity to trigger what they call the

super compensation effect, which is essentially where by removing fatigue in a certain timeline,

but still doing enough, your your body bounces from this value of fatigue to greater fitness.

You're very fit. You see the impacts of your training and your race isn't going to be limited by

things like nervous system stress, muscle damage or the kind of tamper down glycogen stores that we

all get in peak training. So let's talk about some common mistakes. And then that will lead us into

what we actually want to have happen and why we're actually doing this. So one of the most common

mistakes, as said, is just not doing the taper. But the next one is not doing the taper because

maybe you missed some workouts. And so you're thinking, well, I've got two weeks to make up some

fitness. And so you're trying to still get in a longer run, still get in a longer midweek run.

And that is a big mistake, as we'll talk about because you aren't then giving yourself an

actual taper. Yeah. And I know it's always so nerve wrecking if you miss a run in training. Or maybe

you had a peak long run workout and it didn't go as well as we hope. You know, like, well, this is a

bad run. I'll just make it up. But there's a certain point where that isn't making up the stimulus.

That is just compounding fatigue. And we need our workouts to be absorbable and stuff. More work

isn't always better. And a lot of times it is better to go into a race having had a

mistrun or a bad workout. Then show up on the start line of your goal race with muscle damage and

fatigue. The next two mistakes are interesting because they're kind of opposite sides of the same

coin. So one is simply doing your easy runs too fast. So you've cut down a little, you feel good

and you just sort of speed everything up. And the flip side of that is just cutting your

mileage way, way, way too much. And I do see that a lot too. You kind of have had this big peak

and you're tired. And so you're like, well, it's taper and you just start skipping runs.

Yeah. And we'll walk through and guide you through how to gradually progressively reduce that

volume. But I do agree. One of the biggest taper mistakes is changing the frequency of your runs.

That might impact fitness. That also just might make you feel off. And I do feel like a change

to routine can hide and pre-race nerves for some athletes. So it has that impact. Now we'll

get to this more. If you are sick in the taper, you might skip a run. But that's a different

context than just being like, oh, I'm tapering now. I really don't need to do anything at all. Let

me just skip a run. And the other thing I'll say is if you reach your taper and you are so

overcooked by the taper that you want to skip runs, that you're too sore to complete your runs,

you pushed too hard at some point during the final few weeks of training.

The final mistake that we want to make sure you avoid is under fueling. So there is a temptation

because you're running less to then drop down the volume that you're taking in. However,

part of taper is allowing your body to fully recover and then to fully top up those glycogen

stores, which we've talked about in our carbohydrates and different like how to fuel your race episodes.

So I know that it feels weird to some of you, but you really have to make sure you're still eating

enough and not trying to cut corners in terms of calories during this time. It really will backfire.

It will because one of the purposes of the taper, one of the reasons we reduced training volume

is to increase glycogen storage, leading into the race. When you do training for a half marathon,

just like a marathon, your body adapts to store more muscle glycogen. And that is beneficial on

race day because that is going to be a large energy source for that intensity, for that duration.

And so if you don't eat enough, you can't actually fill up those glycogen stores that you worked

so hard to train. And you have a risk then of experiencing low muscle glycogen even in a half

and having that impact your ability to hold your pace late in the race.

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run to the finish. We'll get you free shipping. So you mentioned one of the reasons we like to taper,

but let's go through some of the others. One of the key ones is simply just reducing overall stress.

So nervous system stress, stress on your muscles, stress on your joints, basically all the stress

that just happens as we are training for a half marathon and putting your body through the

paces to help it adapt. So in those couple of weeks that you're tapering, you're not only letting

your muscles recover, but you are finally giving your body a chance to sort of catch up to that work.

So hopefully your sleep is better. You're feeling more relaxed. You're not as stressed because

there's a little bit less that you need to do. Yeah, and that is a very underrated thing because like

training is stressful. People will be like, oh, I run to do stress, but the honest to goodness

fact is it is a physical and psychological stress to train. Training activates your sympathetic

nervous system. It is stress is a stimulus. You need to reduce that if you want to be able to

truly push hard on race day, which is itself a very demanding stressor. You also get the benefit

of having less muscle damage and your fresher muscles can hold a fast pace for longer muscle damage

reduces contractile function. And so if you let your muscles freshen up from those hard workouts,

those long runs, you have less you have better contractile function from that lower damage.

And one of the things that we talk about frequently is that during training, you're basically

sort of compounding fatigue. So there's a reason you're not doing a 13.1 long run with all

goal-paced miles. It's because you've been doing your long runs on tired, fatigued legs,

and that's intentional. So now you're coming into race morning with legs that are fresher,

a mind that is fresher. So it should therefore again, with all the glycogen topped up,

allow you to then hold that goal pace much longer. So that's where like mentally there's a

little push pull that we see throughout training where you guys want to do more and more and more

work at goal pace. But there's a reason that we're not doing all of it at goal pace. And it is

that continued fatigue that's now different because you've given your body that time to

recoup and recover prior to race day. And finally, you do have some blood volume changes

during the taper, particularly if you do include a little bit of intensity, which we'll talk about

what that looks like. And that leads to a boost in VO2 max for race day. And while VO2 max is not

the sole determinant of half marathon performance, it is a contributing variable.

Now how long taper should be is another super common question. And I've already said a couple

times two weeks, that tends to be the standard that I use. What do you tend to lean towards?

I lean towards two weeks for the half marathon. And for some of our listeners who get very like

precise and antsy, that doesn't mean that your longest long run has to be precisely 14 days before,

maybe based on when you do your long run relative to your race. It's 17 days before or 12 days

before, but we're generally thinking two weeks out from race weekend, you're going to start

tapering down. So I just wanted to get that in there because I know some people get so stuck on

those numbers. We're not needing absolute precision here. We're needing this general pattern.

And the other thing that we like to mention is this can vary a little in what that looks like,

depending on if you're a newer runner or a more advanced runner. So for someone who's been

racing a lot and they're going for their half marathon PR, what might you kind of do in terms

of those final peak long runs? Yeah. So for someone who's an experienced runner, they've done

multiple half marathons and they're going for PR, they might do 14 to 16 miles as their longest

run, maybe even a couple times in training. And in that case, they might do their longest duration run

three weeks out, but then their hardest long run because this intensity is the bigger

fatigue and we're thinking about absolute training load, not just duration, their hardest long run

workout, which might be 12 to 13 miles with six to eight miles broken up, two weeks out. Because

again, that's a bigger training load than 14 miles easy for an experienced runner.

Okay. So now we've said we've got two weeks that we're looking at here roughly 14 days in terms

of our taper. So the key now is correctly doing the taper. And I think in the past, there was sort

of an idea like taper just means run less and run less in our heads is like 50% less. And so we

would just sort of see a dramatic drop. And then I wasn't terribly surprised to hear folks were like,

I feel really sluggish come race day. And that's because you're not really following a taper protocol,

you just sort of cut your running. And that's not what we want to do. So we do have an actual

process we want to follow. Yes. And as I've said a few times this episode by really want to

reinforce this, it is gradual and progressive. So you'll do your big hard workout and your first

run of the taper might be just recovery easy miles because you're coming off of that. But your

mileage is going to gradually reduce down that first week of the taper. So roughly seven to 13 days

before your race, your volume might reduce to 60 to 70% of your peak, although some lower volume

runners might be at like 75%. It might almost look a little bit more like a cup back week.

You're going to still do a hard workout, probably roughly like let's say nine to 11 days before

the race, but instead of being you know, six to eight miles at goal pace in might be four to five

miles at goal pace or three miles at half marathon place plus a mile two of repeats at 10k pace after.

That's one I really like because it kind of helps you remember how to push hard which you need for

the end of the race. And then your long run that weekend is going to be less than you did in your

previous ones, but still still a long run, still like 90ish minutes. So that might be nine miles,

10 miles depending on the runner. And if your longest run was 15 miles, 10 miles is going to be

less, but it's still going to give you a little bit of a final stimulus.

I like that phrasing of thinking of week one as a cut back week because then you are kind of

mentally like, oh, I'm not just dropping everything. I'm just sort of reducing a little bit. And I

think that mental awareness is really key to even just how you sort of approach taper. And like

you said, we are keeping some intensity. And that is intentional. So we're still wanting to make

sure we're getting that neuromuscular fitness. But at that lower volume or reduced intensity,

we're not interfering with recovery. So that's kind of the key there is we still want you to feel like

I'm turning over my legs. My body knows what I'm going to ask of it, but I'm doing it at such a

different level or different volume. And because I've even reduced my easy runs a little,

I can recover from it better. Now, I'll note for runners listening who might do that workout and

be like, oh, God, four miles, I have marathon pace felt kind of hard. Two weeks out from my race,

you are still recovering from that peak workout. So don't be alarmed if things do feel kind of like

sluggish and a little rusty during this first week of a taper because you haven't fully tapered

yet, you're still recovering from your peak week. The other thing I will say in starting taper is

for the majority of runners, that is when I am now taking out strength training in terms of picking

up weights. So for most runners who are going for a PR or even going for their first, I really just

want to reduce all muscle damage. So I'd rather take those two weeks and take out the weights.

But we can still keep in some mini band work, keep in some glute exercises core exercises, all of

that is still okay. We still want to like make sure we're working those. We just want to reduce

the fatigue and strength training by its nature is designed to break down your muscle and then repair it.

So I tend to take it out for the entire two weeks. I know some folks might only take it out the

last week. That can be personal preference if you've been doing this a while. I tend to lean

towards two just because I want you to have the most possible recovery. And if you do keep it in during

this like seven to 13 days before the race, I think it is really worth reducing the volume of your

strength workouts. So if you choose to keep it in for some reason or another and you usually doing

three sets of eight, maybe you drop it down to two sets of six because you still want to be tapering

down that muscle damage. And it's the volume of your strength workouts that contribute to that.

Have you ever said that you wished treadmill running felt a little more like outside?

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simulation, it will actually tilt slightly side to side. So now you're starting to mimic the way

in which your body has to move outside. On top of that, you've got dynamic pacing.

So instead of me picking a pace, I will actually just be running. And when I want to run faster,

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This is one that you absolutely need to check out. So now we are into our final week. We are into

race week. And at this point, we're looking at reducing your overall volume from your peak week,

40 to 50%. So this week, you will really feel the drop. But again, then you're going to throw in

the race. So it's not that big of a drop really once you actually throw in the race, but you're

during the week is going to feel less. And sometimes that's even easier to do because you're

traveling. So you've got a travel day. And now there's less stress to worry about getting in all

the miles because you're instead taking more time off. And then oftentimes we will do a small workout,

four to five days, maybe six days depending on your schedule, before the race. Like I mean,

I just said with the week before, this is about keeping things neuromuscularly sharp and keeping

you attuned to how race pace feels. But this is not a sizable workout at all. It might be

four by half mile repeats at race pace or two by one mile repeat at race pace. I usually tend to

keep the total session volume under 20 minutes and have it just right at race pace because I want you

to remember how this feels before race day. And I would say for newer runners, if you haven't been

doing much speed in your entire training cycle, now is not the time that you add speed. You might

be doing some strides if you're comfortable with them. But don't feel like, oh, during taper,

I need to be doing workouts if you have not been doing them. And I would say even for sort of more

novice runners, four by half mile repeats is probably also a bigger workout than maybe what you've

been doing. So yours might be one minute repeats a little bit faster than half marathon pace. But

something short and small that just feels like you're getting the legs moving and sort of keeping

yourself from getting that kind of sluggish feeling from not doing enough. Yes, I should add

these workouts. I've been talking about like we're scaling from six to eight miles in a long run as

your peak. So two miles for those people doesn't feel like much, but you can always think about it

mathematically of like that's one quarter to one third of what you did.

Okay, next question is around the carb load. So we know that the carb load gets talked about

extensively around the marathon. But it is something to still think about when we're looking at

the half marathon. Yes, so you know, with the carb load we now know as we've talked about before,

you don't need a low carb phase before you just need to have trained well and be removing your

training volume to store these carbs, which you're already doing in the taper with the half marathon

though. There's kind of a different approach to a carb load and it will depend on how long it takes

to finish the race. So if you're under 80, 90 minutes, you might not necessarily need to carb load,

but you might want at least deliberately eat plenty of carbs the day before. If you already have

a pretty high carbohydrate diet like six to eight grams per kilogram carbohydrate per day,

that's great. You can keep at that, but you're also welcome to do a one day carb load if you want.

For runners in the one and a half to two hour range, one day carb load, probably at eight grams per

kilogram, maybe up to nine or 10 if you tolerate it well, is appropriate. It's going to really help

you at the end of the race. When we're getting into half marathon over two hours, those people might

benefit from maybe a two day carb load or something. Again, it doesn't need to be as long as the

marathon, but thinking about this will really help your performance because you want to increase

your muscle glycogen for all those reasons we talked about earlier in the episode. Definitely,

I think if you're trying for a PR carb load, if you tend to eat lower carb most of the time,

absolutely, carb load. If this is more of a training run for you, then maybe not. So maybe this is

a training run as part of your full marathon cycle and what you really want to practice is you're

fueling on the day and some of that kind of thing. Then maybe you're not trying to PR it run as hard

as possible. The benefit, however, of practicing your carb load is that then when you get to the marathon,

you've already seen how your body reacts to trying to eat that volume of carbs because it takes

planning and thought to eat 500 grams of carbs in a day, which is what we're talking about often on

the low end for carb loading. So things that can help with that, thinking about adding more snacks to

your day, thinking about adding more carb beverages and keeping it low fiber. So especially pre-race,

we're not wanting you to feel overly stuffed with fiber. And we also don't want that in there to

slow things down or cause any GI distress. All right. So we've talked about the carb load. Now we're

going to get to what should you do if something hurts during the taper. And sometimes the heart is

a real injury that's been lingering in training. Sometimes the heart is your body kind of be like,

what's up, what we do? And we're doing something different. Yeah, we often call this taper

crazy. So it's a little bit of like you have more time mentally and you start overthinking things.

But also your body is in this repair recovery process. And you start noticing things. And I will

say it is not uncommon to have someone like, oh my gosh, my quad is killing me. And then they

start the race and never think about their quad ever again. So oftentimes I go through a process

of, is this sharp? Is this changing your gate? Is this something that you're noticing all the time?

And not just when you go to run. And kind of start using those as a little bit of an evaluation.

I will also say the first day it hurts. Try not to freak out. See if it's still hurting the next day

and the day after before deciding that it is like the end of the world because it is just

beyond common that we have these little aches that pop up and sort of get in your head. And like

I said, the number of times people start the race and then quite literally never think about that

part of their body again is amazing. It is. And this is happening because as you taper,

you are experiencing changes in muscle tension. And while those are necessary, they can kind of make

you feel a little weird. And then I do think the psychology of a race you've been training for

for 12 or so weeks, it's coming up. You're starting to get race nerves. And for a lot of people,

race nerves can manifest physically. We all feel our stress physically whether we want to admit it

or not. 100%. There's this idea of basically tension. So tension in your muscle reduces oxygen

flow, which then is going to create some pain. And you do often just have a lot of nerves,

like you said, coming into race week. So you have a little bit of that extra tension. So

100% normal when it happens. But I do think important, like you said, to take a second and also

decide, like, is this just sort of a taper ache or is this an injury that I have been kind of

ignoring? Because that is also pretty common. Like we've kind of used adrenaline to push through

some of those peak weeks. And now your body has a second to back off from that. And so you finally

start to recognize that the thing you just kept pushing through is maybe a little bit more.

Another really useful metric is an injury will be pain in the same location over and over again,

usually getting worse. If it's traveling aches and pains throughout your body, it's not magically

that you both strange your hamstring and your Achilles and your, I don't know, glute made all

at the same time. So if you get these like traveling aches, you can usually be like, this is my body

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and free shipping. Okay, so the other thing that's super common then is getting sick during taper.

And we actually have another episode coming up where we're going to talk a little bit more in depth

about this kind of idea, but again, super common. So then the question becomes, we've just said,

like, stop skipping a bunch of runs. Don't overly cut your mileage, but what if you get sick?

So if you get sick and you're experiencing symptoms in the neck, including the neck and below.

So you have a cough, you have a sore throat, you have chest congestion or chest pain or body aches,

you probably actually are sick, and you should take a rest day or so because running through sickness

is just going to delay getting better. And we don't want to spread this, like, make this illness

persist into race day. We don't want you dealing with post viral gunk or pneumonia because you

didn't let yourself recover on race day. When you weigh the risks versus the rewards, it's much

better to take the rest when you're acutely sick and avoid lingering issues a week and a half later.

If it's nasal congestion, though, that you can sometimes run through that and that might be more

like the minor allergies or acute immune response, but definitely assess like, did the run make me

feel better or did it make me feel worse? I will also say that I often think sometimes these aches

or the illness are another way of the body sort of forcing us to slow down and actually embrace

the taper. So the fact that you don't feel 100%, cool, embrace that that you're doing lower volume

because your body is kind of telling you it wants a little bit of extra rest. And so sometimes

for a lot of athletes, I think it actually works out to their benefit because it gets them to take

the rest that they've actually been needing so that they come into race day a little bit fresher.

All right, one other question we often get about the taper is should you do a shake out run or

run the day before your race? It's interesting because there's a lot around like what the elites do,

but I think when it comes down to individual preference, some of it is, are you traveling,

are you tired? Were you on your feet all day to go to the expo and do 8 million other things?

You may not need a shake out run. I often find 20 minutes feels kind of nice after I've been

traveling a little bit. The key, however, is many of the shakeout runs have turned into shakeout

races. And so if you're going to go to one of the group runs, absolutely enjoy being around all

the other people, but make sure that you are truly making it a shake out for you. Like you said,

a shakeout really should be like 15 to 20 minutes, like barely in aerobic stimulus,

just enough to move the legs. And now he's bothers me that these shakeouts are like 5k because I'm like

that's like it's not going to be fatiguing, but it's not really a light and easy shakeout for most

runners. The other thing I encourage runners to think is what do I normally do? Do I normally run

the day before my long run or do I normally rest the day before my long run that should inform and

guide you? And then also a shakeout run should never be adding a run to your race week. So if you

always run four days a week, don't all of a sudden run five days during race week to include

a shakeout run, be really deliberate in thinking about maintaining your routine, including run

frequency without adding on race week. That's a great point. Anything else you want to leave

everyone with when they're thinking about their half marathon taper.

You know, I know we've said this all before, but I think it is really worth framing races like the

half marathon is worth tapering for. We have such a focus on the marathon right now that I feel like

people are like, oh, it's just a half, it's just a 10 gauge, just a 5k, but you trained hard for

it and you are worth putting in the investment of the taper. So treat it as the goal race that it

is to set yourself up for success. Don't view it as something less because it's not a marathon.

What would you say? I think that's a great point. I would say treat your taper like you treated

the rest of your training plan. So you followed the plan, you trusted the plan. So keep doing that

through taper. I would also say if you have that little bit of extra time during taper,

this might be when you take a second to sit down and work on a little bit of the mental stuff.

So what are my mantras going to be? Start visualizing when it gets hard in the race. What is my

reaction going to be? Am I going to take in a gel, take in some water? Do I walk through aid stations?

So do some of that mental work and mental rehearsal? It's great to do it all through training,

but this is kind of your final prep, the final moments where you maybe have a little bit of extra

20 minutes that you aren't going for a run to sit down and really think through it and feel like

when you get up to that start line, even if you're a little nervous, you know you're prepared.

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